HeloBubba53

For the most part I agree. But the whole point of the annual award was to enable pilots to bid on vacation without having their vacation award taken if they moved seats/base. And I appreciate that effort by the Union. (August bid is awarded in Sep for the following year. Then Vacation awards bid in October for that same year. That way they know what seat you are bidding vacation for.) What would be nice is to go back to the quarterly bid AND have some statement about not losing vacation rights when you move.

BeatNavy

That’s essentially what happens with supp bids anyway. VAC doesn’t drop. That’s why I think we ought to have an annual vacation bid but quarterly system bids. Someone gets lucky with their more junior vacation than the seat to which they bid? So be it.

BeatNavy

The annual bid can have an effective date of 1 Jan. This supp is 2 Dec. Both can have training 120 days prior and both create vacancies they need. So they essentially only bought themselves an extra month, though they can create the necessary Newhire vacancies earlier. I think they had to do it, but it was just kind of dumb the way it’s working out creating a whole bid with an effective date only 1 month prior to the first date for the next annual bid. None of this would have been necessary with quarterly bids, which offer more flexibility for the company. Better for the pilots imo as well. So long as we wouldn’t lose vacation of course.

Bgood

Yeah the ideal thing would be quarterly with no losing vacation. But currently, it's atleast good they make us bid what we want before giving everything to the newhires.

IrishNJ

The annual bid DOES have quarterly bidding. There are four effective dates, one each quarter. I don't see the downside for pilots of being able to plan your year ahead of time ... you don't want to spend half your summer in MCO upgrading? great, bid a fall/winter upgrade and if you can't hold it, you can still bid summer.

If the company needs flexibility, they still have supplemental bids.

BeatNavy

“The annual system bid may contain multiple effective dates.” As many or as few as they want. iirc the first one had 5. So, semantics, but not exactly quarterly. And also that’s not quarterly bidding. That’s annual bidding for multiple time periods for the following year. So there are quarterly (roughly) effective dates, but the bid for it was potentially over a year prior. There’s a difference. Also, it’s not exactly easy for them, or me, to accurately project the whole following year’s needs. Things change for them as we saw over the last 18 months, as well as for me and my family’s schedule. I’d rather not bid in august 2021 for a time period in late 2022 for training. Especially since it’s uncertain on which effective date I’d be awarded something (yeah I could just not bid it, but other stuff comes up that isn’t planned in august the year prior).

And let’s say there is an annual bid, with 5 effective dates again, out through dec 2022, then they decide they need a supplemental. Now those future bids/vacancies will be messed up if a person holding a yet to happen award bids something else. For example, say I have 220CA effective Dec 2022. Then a supp comes out effective date June 2022. I decide to do 320 CA. Now my previous award is superseded, and the previous vacancy I filled for the 220CA spot for December 2022 is back unfilled. How do they they fill that December 220CA slot I just vacated? The June effective date supplemental won’t cover a now uncovered December vacancy. But the supplemental can also have multiple effective dates. So then they’d likely have a clean up effective date for later for the reason I just stated, to ensure all new vacancies created by the earlier supp even out to the December target numbers. We didn’t have this issue on the previous supplementals because there were no future awards/trainings since the first annual affected by covid was canceled and the second had no awards throughout this year. So each supplemental was its own bid, with no real impact on future award dates from a previous bid.

With the mechanism in place for multiple future effective dates in both the annual system bid and supplemental bids, it’s just going to be messy if/when the above scenario happens. If we had quarterly *bidding* and not just multiple effective dates, they could adjust staffing/vacancies on a closer to real-time basis, with less of a dartboard approach trying to project needs 12-18 months out, especially for the second half of the following year.

I just see 4 consistently timed quarterly bids each year as a lot less messy than one bid with 5 effective dates, plus supplementals which can each have multiple effective dates that overlap with existing effective dates from other previous bids. I see it as better for pilots and better for the company.

panpanpan

Totally agree with this. Most other airlines have closer to quarterly bids and it makes a lot more sense.

Patsfan1220

Having the opportunity to only make base/seat/equip changes once a year vs. every three months was a huge loss of flexibility imo and should absolutely be a targeted area of improvement next contract.

Wounded Duck

I think this was already touched on so I’ll try to be brief. It’s all about the vacation section of the contract. The CBA forced them to make enough vacation slots for everyone to get vacation and it forced them to allocate them more evenly across all months. That’s why you have to take vacation. They don’t want all the good vacation slots used and the ones nobody wants unused/deferred/sold back whatever. They don’t want any crossover. If you get a system bid upgrade with an effective date of June 1st, when it comes time to bid vacation, any vacation weeks you want before June 1st you are bidding against FOs and any after June 1st is part of the CA run.

Jetblue is big on one way rules. If it works for them they can do it but if it works for you they don’t have to do it. They can have as many supplemental bids as they want. They aren’t limited to a quarterly timeframe so it gives them more flexibility. The do have to eat the vacation but that’s the price they have to pay for the flexibility. If it was a quarterly bid the CBA would either say pilot keeps their vacation award or it would say the vacation weeks are rolled over to next year. If it’s the former they have junior guys with senior vacation weeks which is more then they had allocated for the month. If it’s the later they are paying for vacation weeks at captains pay instead of first officer pay. Either way they are forced to eat the costs 3 times a year instead of whenever they feel it’s worth it to them.

In the end a yearly system bid with the option to fully cancel or partially cancel awards combined with the ability to run supplemental bids anytime they need gives them the most flexibility for the lowest cost. As an added bonus it makes things more difficult for the pilots to plan their lives.

nuball5

I’m fine with the yearly system bid if they would just allow us to bid for specific training dates. This whole 120 days prior to your effective date is terrible. The more senior you are the more unpredictability there is on when you’ll go to training. If someone senior is awarded something in the December effective date, they’re in Orlando at the end of the summer. You should be able to bid your effective date in PVBM like we do now, and then bid a training date in Flica like we do for CQT. If I’m going to be away from my family for a month, I want more control on when I’m leaving. We’re a three fleet airline now, QT training isn’t the once in a career experience anymore.